Global Warming Is Real Warm
I heard on the BBC last week that temperatures around the world have been 2-3 degrees higher this year than ever before. Apparently this is a very significant rise, and has caused a lot of countries’ dry seasons to be longer and dryer than usual. That would explain why it’s almost the end of March and the rains just started today. Hopefully they’ve started for good. My washcloth is a disturbing color of brown.
We’ve been getting one day of rain every 7-10 days for the last couple of months, but today feels like rainy season rain. Long, cold and really wet. I finally planted a few seeds in my tiny little plot that vaguely resembles a shamba. I’ve planted eight rows of vegetables, because that’s as much room as I have. And I had to buy KukuNet (chicken wire) to fence it off from my chickens. The maize that I’ve been throwing in the yard for them has sprouted into, surprise, maize plants! I got a tomato plant after I tossed them a rotten tomato, too. Nature is pretty amazing.
Godi Strikes Again. I don’t see him much because he is often in the field for weeks at a time conducting mobile VCTs. But he always has something culturally significant (to me) and blog-worthy (to you) to say, so when he’s in the office I try to chat him up a bit.
Recently I’ve been campaigning for my organization to provide more support for career development of its counselors. I got the idea after one of our counselors told me she discourages clients from using condoms.
“Uhhhhh…you do whuhhhht?” I said.
“Well, condoms can sometimes be unreliable so I tell them not to use them,” she said.
“They’re unreliable 1 percent of the time, usually because people use them incorrectly,” I said. “As a VCT counselor, shouldn’t you be telling people how to avoid getting AIDS? How are people supposed to protect themselves if you’re telling them not to use condoms?”
“I tell them to abstain,” she said.
“If a client comes for an HIV test, you can safely assume they’re not abstaining,” I said.
“Oh,” she said, starting to backpeddle. “I only tell them to abstain if they’re not married. Youth should not be having sex.”
“Do you really think a 19-year-old boy who is already having sex is going to start abstaining because you told him to?” I said.
“Oh,” she said again. Peddle peddle peddle. “I tell them about condoms. And I tell them about abstaining and being faithful. I give them all the information, and let them choose.”
The conversation bugged me. In order to become a VCT counselor, you’re supposed to attend a month-long training that includes how to give accurate and unbiased information. Once they start practicing, the counselors are supposed to be supervised so that this type of thing doesn’t happen.
“We have a problem with some counselors imposing their own morals on clients,” Godi said.
Great.
The PCV who was here before me had put together a small library of books on HIV, ARVs, STIs, health and other relevant topics for anyone on staff to access. The problem is that the management team all nodded enthusiastically and told the PCV that she’d done a great job, then promptly did nothing. Oh, except that they put all the materials in a locked cabinet and gave the only key to one of the counselors, who is rarely in the office because she goes out for mobile VCTs.
I suggested to Godi that counselors be encouraged to review the materials in this library, especially in their copious free time. Or that they simply be reminded at staff meetings that whenever they get a question from clients that they can’t answer, that the library is there to help them find answers. Godi told me he didn’t even know the resource center existed.
“Also you just can’t tell people,” he said, switching into embarrassed vague mode, which drives me crazy.
“You can’t tell people what?” I said.
“You can’t tell people things,” he said.
“I know, you just said that,” I said impatiently. “What can’t you tell them and why not?”
He just stared at me, his grin and his embarrassment growing. “I don’t know,” he finally said.
“Yes, you do!” I said. “You know. Why do you say you can’t tell people things?”
He paused for a long time, and I could tell the cogs were turning in his head trying to figure out how to explain something to a mzungu that a mzungu can’t understand.
“You sometimes want to tell someone some things, but it’s not good, so you just keep quiet,” he said.
AAAARGGHHH!!! I just stared at him across the table, slack-jawed, my cheekbone cupped in my hand.
“We don’t have a learning culture,” he said finally. “If you tell someone to improve, maybe they can never talk to you again. People don’t want to admit they don’t know something. They don’t want to admit they’ve made a mistake. So to tell people to use the resource center is very hard.”
“Ah,” I said. “So asking someone to research a question that they couldn’t answer during a counseling session wouldn’t work.”
“No, they can even give the client any answer, even a wrong one, just so they don’t look as if they don’t know the answer,” he said. “So it is very hard to have a learning culture.”
Great.
Well, I’m still waiting for the lady with the key to get back, so I can rummage around the library and see what we can do to encourage a learning culture among our staff. The good news is that there are people in my organization who are always eager to add to their technical knowledge, who ask for advice when they don’t know the answers, and who believe that there’s always an opportunity to improve their skills. Is it possible to spread this mentality to other staff members? We’ll see.
OWLS=Old Growth Forest in the U.S., Death in Kenya. I’m designing this year’s t-shirt for Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World), the annual leadership camp that Peace Corps hosts for secondary school girls in Kenya. I racked my brain for design ideas that fit the following criteria:
Meaningful to Kenyan girls
Not offensive to Kenyan girls
Not offensive to any other Kenyan
Attractive and fun to Kenyan girls
I was worried because my knowledge of Kenyan symbols is limited. I didn’t want to inadvertently use something that is widely regarded in Kenya as bad luck or just unappealing (chameleons, slugs, snakes, rats), and I didn’t want to create something that I thought was profoundly clever, but that the girls wouldn’t get.
For example, one of my favorite lines from the poem A Woman’s Creed is, “We are the women men warned us about.” Well, Kenyan girls don’t find it especially amusing, even after I explain it.
Earlier that day Nick had told me that owls are regarded as bad luck. If you see an owl land in a tree, he said, it means someone will die. He says it has happened several times to people he knows. There is even a special way to chase the owl away to break the curse (light a tree branch on fire and throw it at the owl).
So, no owls, no snakes, no chameleons, no slugs. I finally decided on sunflowers in various stages of growth. The girls who attend Camp GLOW grow so much in the course of the week, and what girl doesn’t like sunflowers? Even I like sunflowers, and I hate clothes with flowers on them. As far as I know there are no negative associations with sunflowers here. I mean, they have farms for them up near Kitale.
P.S. OWLS is the mnemonic that kids in California learn for identifying an old growth forest. You know a forest is old growth because it:
is Old
has Woody debris
has a Layered canopy
has Snags
Neat, huh?
Food Is the Most Important Meal of the Day. I’ve never been much of a Thai chef, because there’s always a good Thai restaurant around the corner…in San Francisco. So I’d pretty much written off the possibility of Thai food in Kenya, until Brady introduced me to lemongrass and fish sauce, which are both available at Nakumatt. I can now make a stripped-down tom yum soup base! It’s ginger, lemongrass, fish sauce, chili paste (the Thai stuff that uses shrimp), coconut milk, vinegar and lemon juice. For the food part I add beef, shitake mushrooms, green onions and (gasp!) Ramen noodles. Hey, you gotta improvise. Kaffir lime is also a key ingredient, and one that’s not so easily found in Kenya. I don’t even know what it is. Is it a fruit? Is it an herb?
Dr. Patti, the Peace Corps doctor, came by my town today for a site visit. The visit was for basic assessments – what’s my water situation, what’s my safety and security situation, do I have electricity, are my pets clean and immunized, do I have a hole-free mosquito net, any potential health hazards at my site, how’s my mental condition, am I diarrhea free, etc.
She saw a list on my wall called “USA, So Far Away,” listing things I miss from home, and saw that one of the items was asparagus.
“You know, we get lovely asparagus in Nairobi,” she said. “You should look for it at Sarit Center next time you’re in town.”
Suddenly she seemed to change her mind, and picked up her phone. “Honey,” she said to her husband on the other end. “Could you add asparagus to the shopping list? I’m with a volunteer who wrote it on a list of things she misses from home. She’ll pick it up when she comes to Nairobi.”
Eeeeeeeeee!!! It’s small acts of kindness like this that makes her so amazing, in addition to her competence as a doctor. She also brought me a jar of Nutella, not easily found in Kenya. There are a few people on the medical staff who have similar hearts of kindness. One of the nurses sent a large plate of cheese and crackers to our in-service training in Kitui, knowing that a lot of PCVs miss this staple hors d’oeuvre in cheese-deficient Kenya. Another nurse gave me the leftovers from her lunch, the exact contents of which I now forget, but it was something American, had meat, and included a salad. And most importantly, she let me heat it up in the microwave. The microwave!!! I’d forgotten those things exist.
SMS I received today: “I <3 dr.patti! shes so kind&she duznt giv me a breast exam wen I hav diarrhea. cuz ima boy!”
We’ve been getting one day of rain every 7-10 days for the last couple of months, but today feels like rainy season rain. Long, cold and really wet. I finally planted a few seeds in my tiny little plot that vaguely resembles a shamba. I’ve planted eight rows of vegetables, because that’s as much room as I have. And I had to buy KukuNet (chicken wire) to fence it off from my chickens. The maize that I’ve been throwing in the yard for them has sprouted into, surprise, maize plants! I got a tomato plant after I tossed them a rotten tomato, too. Nature is pretty amazing.
Godi Strikes Again. I don’t see him much because he is often in the field for weeks at a time conducting mobile VCTs. But he always has something culturally significant (to me) and blog-worthy (to you) to say, so when he’s in the office I try to chat him up a bit.
Recently I’ve been campaigning for my organization to provide more support for career development of its counselors. I got the idea after one of our counselors told me she discourages clients from using condoms.
“Uhhhhh…you do whuhhhht?” I said.
“Well, condoms can sometimes be unreliable so I tell them not to use them,” she said.
“They’re unreliable 1 percent of the time, usually because people use them incorrectly,” I said. “As a VCT counselor, shouldn’t you be telling people how to avoid getting AIDS? How are people supposed to protect themselves if you’re telling them not to use condoms?”
“I tell them to abstain,” she said.
“If a client comes for an HIV test, you can safely assume they’re not abstaining,” I said.
“Oh,” she said, starting to backpeddle. “I only tell them to abstain if they’re not married. Youth should not be having sex.”
“Do you really think a 19-year-old boy who is already having sex is going to start abstaining because you told him to?” I said.
“Oh,” she said again. Peddle peddle peddle. “I tell them about condoms. And I tell them about abstaining and being faithful. I give them all the information, and let them choose.”
The conversation bugged me. In order to become a VCT counselor, you’re supposed to attend a month-long training that includes how to give accurate and unbiased information. Once they start practicing, the counselors are supposed to be supervised so that this type of thing doesn’t happen.
“We have a problem with some counselors imposing their own morals on clients,” Godi said.
Great.
The PCV who was here before me had put together a small library of books on HIV, ARVs, STIs, health and other relevant topics for anyone on staff to access. The problem is that the management team all nodded enthusiastically and told the PCV that she’d done a great job, then promptly did nothing. Oh, except that they put all the materials in a locked cabinet and gave the only key to one of the counselors, who is rarely in the office because she goes out for mobile VCTs.
I suggested to Godi that counselors be encouraged to review the materials in this library, especially in their copious free time. Or that they simply be reminded at staff meetings that whenever they get a question from clients that they can’t answer, that the library is there to help them find answers. Godi told me he didn’t even know the resource center existed.
“Also you just can’t tell people,” he said, switching into embarrassed vague mode, which drives me crazy.
“You can’t tell people what?” I said.
“You can’t tell people things,” he said.
“I know, you just said that,” I said impatiently. “What can’t you tell them and why not?”
He just stared at me, his grin and his embarrassment growing. “I don’t know,” he finally said.
“Yes, you do!” I said. “You know. Why do you say you can’t tell people things?”
He paused for a long time, and I could tell the cogs were turning in his head trying to figure out how to explain something to a mzungu that a mzungu can’t understand.
“You sometimes want to tell someone some things, but it’s not good, so you just keep quiet,” he said.
AAAARGGHHH!!! I just stared at him across the table, slack-jawed, my cheekbone cupped in my hand.
“We don’t have a learning culture,” he said finally. “If you tell someone to improve, maybe they can never talk to you again. People don’t want to admit they don’t know something. They don’t want to admit they’ve made a mistake. So to tell people to use the resource center is very hard.”
“Ah,” I said. “So asking someone to research a question that they couldn’t answer during a counseling session wouldn’t work.”
“No, they can even give the client any answer, even a wrong one, just so they don’t look as if they don’t know the answer,” he said. “So it is very hard to have a learning culture.”
Great.
Well, I’m still waiting for the lady with the key to get back, so I can rummage around the library and see what we can do to encourage a learning culture among our staff. The good news is that there are people in my organization who are always eager to add to their technical knowledge, who ask for advice when they don’t know the answers, and who believe that there’s always an opportunity to improve their skills. Is it possible to spread this mentality to other staff members? We’ll see.
OWLS=Old Growth Forest in the U.S., Death in Kenya. I’m designing this year’s t-shirt for Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World), the annual leadership camp that Peace Corps hosts for secondary school girls in Kenya. I racked my brain for design ideas that fit the following criteria:
Meaningful to Kenyan girls
Not offensive to Kenyan girls
Not offensive to any other Kenyan
Attractive and fun to Kenyan girls
I was worried because my knowledge of Kenyan symbols is limited. I didn’t want to inadvertently use something that is widely regarded in Kenya as bad luck or just unappealing (chameleons, slugs, snakes, rats), and I didn’t want to create something that I thought was profoundly clever, but that the girls wouldn’t get.
For example, one of my favorite lines from the poem A Woman’s Creed is, “We are the women men warned us about.” Well, Kenyan girls don’t find it especially amusing, even after I explain it.
Earlier that day Nick had told me that owls are regarded as bad luck. If you see an owl land in a tree, he said, it means someone will die. He says it has happened several times to people he knows. There is even a special way to chase the owl away to break the curse (light a tree branch on fire and throw it at the owl).
So, no owls, no snakes, no chameleons, no slugs. I finally decided on sunflowers in various stages of growth. The girls who attend Camp GLOW grow so much in the course of the week, and what girl doesn’t like sunflowers? Even I like sunflowers, and I hate clothes with flowers on them. As far as I know there are no negative associations with sunflowers here. I mean, they have farms for them up near Kitale.
P.S. OWLS is the mnemonic that kids in California learn for identifying an old growth forest. You know a forest is old growth because it:
is Old
has Woody debris
has a Layered canopy
has Snags
Neat, huh?
Food Is the Most Important Meal of the Day. I’ve never been much of a Thai chef, because there’s always a good Thai restaurant around the corner…in San Francisco. So I’d pretty much written off the possibility of Thai food in Kenya, until Brady introduced me to lemongrass and fish sauce, which are both available at Nakumatt. I can now make a stripped-down tom yum soup base! It’s ginger, lemongrass, fish sauce, chili paste (the Thai stuff that uses shrimp), coconut milk, vinegar and lemon juice. For the food part I add beef, shitake mushrooms, green onions and (gasp!) Ramen noodles. Hey, you gotta improvise. Kaffir lime is also a key ingredient, and one that’s not so easily found in Kenya. I don’t even know what it is. Is it a fruit? Is it an herb?
Dr. Patti, the Peace Corps doctor, came by my town today for a site visit. The visit was for basic assessments – what’s my water situation, what’s my safety and security situation, do I have electricity, are my pets clean and immunized, do I have a hole-free mosquito net, any potential health hazards at my site, how’s my mental condition, am I diarrhea free, etc.
She saw a list on my wall called “USA, So Far Away,” listing things I miss from home, and saw that one of the items was asparagus.
“You know, we get lovely asparagus in Nairobi,” she said. “You should look for it at Sarit Center next time you’re in town.”
Suddenly she seemed to change her mind, and picked up her phone. “Honey,” she said to her husband on the other end. “Could you add asparagus to the shopping list? I’m with a volunteer who wrote it on a list of things she misses from home. She’ll pick it up when she comes to Nairobi.”
Eeeeeeeeee!!! It’s small acts of kindness like this that makes her so amazing, in addition to her competence as a doctor. She also brought me a jar of Nutella, not easily found in Kenya. There are a few people on the medical staff who have similar hearts of kindness. One of the nurses sent a large plate of cheese and crackers to our in-service training in Kitui, knowing that a lot of PCVs miss this staple hors d’oeuvre in cheese-deficient Kenya. Another nurse gave me the leftovers from her lunch, the exact contents of which I now forget, but it was something American, had meat, and included a salad. And most importantly, she let me heat it up in the microwave. The microwave!!! I’d forgotten those things exist.
SMS I received today: “I <3 dr.patti! shes so kind&she duznt giv me a breast exam wen I hav diarrhea. cuz ima boy!”
posted by Justina at 11:24 PM
1 Comments:
Hey Justina! Kaffir Lime is a leaf, to answer your question. But I think a quick squeeze of lime or lime zest will work in a pinch. I'm burning midnight oil here writing a rather uninspired report on Asian American women and cancer, so I thought I'd stop by your blog for some inspiration. It worked! Hope you're well. - Eugenia
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